Distinguished Service

There is something romantic about municipal golf courses. From the no-frills clubhouses to the rickety rental pushcarts to the discounted club bins, there is always a sense upon stepping onto the property that at these places, the emphasis is squarely on playing the game, if for no other reason than budgets preclude fancy, but distracting, amenities.

That feeling exudes at the easier-to-pronounce-than-spell Okeeheelee GC in West Palm Beach, Fla., a 27-hole layout that’s part of a massive park by the same name. In this case, Palm Beach County owns the course, and has been contracting out its operations to a company called Professional Golf Services, Inc., for years. That company is co-owned by original founder Donna White — a three-time LPGA Tour winner and member of the LPGA Teaching and Club Professional (T&CP) Hall of Fame — her daughter Kristin, and Mary-Lee Cobick. It is Kristin White and Cobick who now run the company’s day-to-day, with Cobick serving as Okeeheelee’s head professional.

On a beautiful Thursday in mid-December Cobick, donning a two-tone blue golf shirt, white shorts and a wireless headset around her neck — a Godsend she says — visits with a guest in the downstairs snack bar. It may be morning but already the deep fryer is producing intoxicating and familiar smells.

Cobick is in her 20th year at Okeeheelee. That fact is corroborated by her deep, dark tan, but not by her accent. Though her English is near perfect, Cobick’s speech can’t hide her roots. She’s a kid from northwestern Quebec — a 12,000-strong community called Amos to be exact — who loves the sunshine and warm weather of her adopted home here in Florida but misses her family and the food of her native land — good pizza and good potato chips to be exact.

“I love my Humpty Dumpty barbecue,” she joked.

In a day and age when the golf industry is looking for ways to get more affordable, more fun and more inclusive, Cobick, Okeeheelee, her partners, their staffs and the two other golf properties they run — Park Ridge GC and the John Prince Learning Center — are way ahead of the curve. Municipal courses always have been, really, but these suddenly hot-topic industry desires are very evident at Okeeheelee.

Consider all of this: Within Professional Golf Services, Inc., is the Junior Golf Foundation of America, of which Cobick is the president. It was established in 1995 to help juniors from struggling families get into the game via course access, scholarships, equipment and PGA coaching. It now encompasses more than 7,500 kids. At Okeeheelee, where the rate tops out at $48 and its visitors are comprised of middle-class white, black, Asian and Hispanic golf enthusiasts, there is a family scramble tournament every month and $25 parent-child rates on Sundays. There are additional junior leagues, a Junior Leaders program where kids are hired on to help out in the golf shop, grants procured from different organizations, and a strong relationship with the PGA Tour’s Honda Classic.

That’s only part of what keeps Cobick busy and in need of that Bluetooth headset. She also teaches — LPGA Academy girls at Okeeheelee and a group of Quebec snowbirds — and co-authored the LPGA-USGA Girls Golf Teaching PLAYbook in 2015. She’s a U.S. Kids Golf Certified Instructor, a First Tee Instructor and a member of the PGA of Canada. It’s for all of those reasons, and more, that Cobick became the first Canadian to win the LPGA T&CP Professional of the Year award in 2016, a high honour she said she shares with many people.

“I get the award, I’m lucky, but honestly if you look at everything we do, it’s the whole staff,” she said. “It’s all the staff through the 19 years that I’ve worked with and worked for.”

As it happens, Cobick picked up her prize at the PGA Show in late January, nearly 20 years to the week after she started at Okeeheelee. It was also 30 years after she won the SCOREGolf Award for Canadian Junior of the Year in 1987. In between, she played a handful of Canadian Women’s Opens and was the top golfer on the old du Maurier Series in 2000 when she captured three tournaments.

Given that her father Joe bought Amos’ nine-hole course when she was a tot, you’d think Cobick was something of a golf prodigy. In actual fact her childhood centred on competitive figure skating. Yet as she grew older she gained more of an appreciation for one of golf’s simplest, endearing and most overlooked qualities: Style points don’t matter.

“You could actually make a mistake and make it up and win an event,” Cobick explained. “Nobody is judging you on style. Nobody is judging you on the clothes you are wearing. Nobody is judging you on who your coach is or where you’re from. Your score is your final judge.”

Cobick attended Florida State University after spending one year at Montreal’s Dawson College to polish her English reading and writing skills. She was bilingual thanks to her father, who insisted his children speak to him in English and their mother in French growing up. That proved to be a tremendous asset for Cobick when she headed south for school and, eventually, when she was hired by White. Although Cobick enjoyed success playing competitively for seven years, she came to love the time she spent working at the course during her off-seasons and eventually decided to make it her full-time career.

“I didn’t have the fire to continue playing,” she reminisced, explaining that she came to that conclusion after a Canadian Women’s Open at Royal Ottawa in 2000 where she didn’t feel any envy towards the LPGA Tour’s stars who were packing their bags for a tournament in Europe. “I remember being by my car and thinking, ‘Gosh, I’m glad I’m not flying out.’ And then I got in my car to drive back to Florida and while I was driving I thought, ‘I should have been excited to get on that plane and go to Europe and play.’ And that’s when I realized it’s hard enough to do it when you are excited about it, but if you don’t have that excitement then it’s not much fun.”

From that point on Okeeheelee has been her life — she now lives across the street and sometimes rollerblades to work — and like most busy bees in the industry she plays only sparingly, mostly when her parents visit in the winter.

As for her future Cobick, with a tremendous award now on her résume, isn’t slamming the door shut on one day landing at a more posh place in the private club domain. But given her childhood in Amos, where the local course was so inclusive and welcoming to juniors, and her now 20 years serving the public at Okeeheelee, it’s pretty clear what she is doing now is her true calling and passion.

“This facility is how I grew up,” she said. “It’s public. It’s with kids who aren’t part of a private club. They’re not super wealthy. The ones that have difficulties we have the foundation . . . We have always been very much orientated towards junior membership. We’re very close with all the parents in the program. To me, golf is family.”